Friday, December 31, 2010

The pair of black and white kittens were born under the sagging front porch of a ramshackle house in a chronically depressed neighborhood in a politically corrupt, drug-ridden Ohio River city that achieved national notoriety as the “Oxycontin Capital of America.” Oxycontin, the brand name for a time release variety of oxycodone, is distributed by the river city’s six pill mills, which do a brisk business serving the needs of the many unemployed addicts and public assistance recipients in the community; and it is distributed to the legal and business professionals by a drug dealing pimp who recruits teenage girls as prostitutes by getting them hooked on the drug.

Almost every family in the city has a son, a daughter or a relative whose life has been touched tragically by Oxycontin. The son of the mayor is an addict, the son of the police chief is an addict, the son of a judge is an addict, and so is the daughter of a bail bondsman. The sons and daughters of teachers and preachers; social workers and city shirkers; bikers and hikers; rich and poor; white and black; Catholic, Protestant, and Jew—all have been scarred by Oxycontin, which the addicts pulverize before ingesting to deactivate the time release feature and hasten the drug’s narcotic kick.

Months before they were born, the alley cat mother of the kittens had become addicted as a result of the antics of two high school dropouts who fed her OxyContin laced sardines for laughs and then posted a video of her bizarre behavior on YouTube, which went viral. They also posted photos of her on Facebook where the “Oxycontin Cat” gained more friends than a Quaker convention.

Like one out of ten babies born in the local hospital, the two kittens were already addicted to Oxycontin at birth. Even before they could see, they were getting their Oxycontin fix through their mother’s milk. A crisis arose before they were a month old when their mother, as programmed by nature, began to wean them. The kittens could not understand why she was withholding their fix, and they grew agitated, but kittens must switch from a liquid to a solid food diet because as adults cats become lactose intolerant. But the addicted kittens never became Oxycontin intolerant.

The kittens were orphaned on a cold New Year's eve, in their fourth week of life when their hallucinating mother was splattered by a car as she dashed across the street to catch an imaginary mouse that she intended to bring back to the kittens under the porch to start them on a solid food diet. Her feline corpse lay splattered on the street like a ten-topping Domino’s pizza dropped from the Tower of Pisa. The dropouts next door to the ramshackle house adopted the two orphaned kittens, naming the male with the black nose, Oxy, and his sister with the black eye, Contin. But the dropouts moved out and the kittens were left to fend for themselves.

Late at night, if you see a cat with a black nose or a black eye, you may be seeing Oxy or Contin. A normal cat’s sense of smell is fourteen times more acute than a human’s, but an Oxycontined cat’s sense of smell is so far beyond the range of human comprehension that a number cannot convey the qualitative difference between their chemically enhanced sense of smell and the attenuated sense of smell that homo sapiens developed once they stood up and stopped sniffing around like dogs.

If you do catch sight of Oxy or Contin, you can be fiarly sure that somewhere not too far away is a cache of Oxycontin, or even a single pill. There's a legend, which is hard to believe, that on their first New Year’s Eve, Oxy and Contin, with their nose for Oxycontin, went from pill mill to pill mill in River City caterwauling like two lost souls in hell. For addicted cats and humans, that’s what life is like in the Capital of Oxycontin—hell. In River City, neither kittens or kids are safe from the scourge of narcotics, and you never know whose son or daughter will fall victim. If Christ had been born in the Capital of Oxycontin in the United States of Addiction, instead of Bethlehem, even he might have ended up an addict, and the Sone of God might have said, "Cursed are the addicted for they never shall see the kingdom of heaven."

Friday, December 24, 2010

I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I heard recently that when Portsmouth lawyer Clayton Johnson enters the Second Presbyterian Church, the organist plays the theme from The Godfather. If it’s only a joke, it tells you something that it’s making the rounds this Christmas season.

Yes, this is the Christmas season and in that spirit I think a more appropriate analogy would be not Vito Corleone, the Godfather, but Ebenezer Scrooge, Esq., the Lawyer. Not once but twice, first in 1980 and again in 2010, the citizens of Portsmouth have been screwed by Ebenezer Scrooge, who manipulated the latitude afforded him by Portsmouth’s Home Rule charter to help remove duly elected members of local government who would not go along with the corruption-as-usual policy; it was Scrooge who saw that the council members were replaced with tools and lapdogs eager to serve the interests of the multimillionaire clique who control Portsmouth economically and politically.

In 1980 members of the Portsmouth City Council were recalled because they allegedly opposed the building of a shopping mall that would have restored prosperity, almost magically, to the city. What does it say about any city whose sustaining, redemptive myth, whose last hope, is a mall? In 2010 it is Mayor Jane Murray who has been recalled from office because of high crimes and misdemeanors, the most notorious of which was firing three unelected white male political hacks on her first day in office. To fire three political hacks on her first day in office created a firestorm the flames of which the fink at the Times and the Motormouth at WNXT never stopped fanning. (The fink at the Times, incidentally, was reportedly doing the same thing back in the 1980s on the radio, at WPAY.) Behind the recall of Mayor Murray and those council members and pulling the strings and calling the recall shots, in my opinion, was none other than the same Ebenezer Scrooge, Esq. In support of my opinion that Scrooge was behind the recall of Murray, I cannot forget that infamous lunch Scrooge had at a local restaurant, as overheard and reported by Teresa Mollette, where he boasted to an out of town visitor about how the recalcitrant council members had been recalled from office back in 1980 and how something like that had to be done again to rid the city government of troublemakers.

And Scrooge did it again and Jane Murray is gone and in her place is somebody who had run for mayor twice and been soundly rejected by the voters, namely David Malone, a man who by every conceivable criteria is unfit for the office. The only reason Scrooge has engineered Malone’s ascension to the mayor’s office is that Malone will try do what Jim Kalb tried and failed to do as mayor, which is move city government out of the Municipal Building and into the now notorious Marting building. As it stands, leaks and rots, the Marting building represents the biggest, most scandalous, and costliest failure in Scrooge’s career, costliest not in terms of money but in terms of reputation. If Scrooge has one more goal in his career it is probably to try and remove the stigma of Marting from his resumé by converting the building into a showplace rather than a reminder, as is now the case of Portsmouth’s stupendous drug problem. Marting’s display windows now serve as a display case for the county’s drug casualties. That is what Portsmouth now has to offer young people: death at an early age from overdosing. More of our young people die from overdosing than in automobile accidents. Just yesterday, a few days before Christmas, the Associated Press reportedthat one in ten children born in Scioto County and Portsmouth are born addicted. Is it so surprising that this is the case in a city in which Charles Horner is still chief of police, the same Charles Hornrer whose son was dealing drugs in Damon’s Restaurant, directly across the street from the police station, the same son who is still being shown preferential treatment by the Portsmouth police department, from what I’ve heard. And it is Jane Murray, not Horner, who is out in the cold!

The lasting failure of Jane Murray may be that Horner was not one of those she fired her first day in office. The last three mayors have wanted to fire Horner, and they are history and there he is still playing J. Edgar Hoover, with his snooping and intimidation. On his watch, Portsmouth has become notorious nationally for drugs and crime. Would Horner still be chief without the complicity of Scrooge? I don’t think so. And could a drug dealing pimp have been appointed (appointed not elected) to the city council, without at least the tacit approval of Ebenezer Scrooge, Esq.? I don’t think so.

Scrooge's House

Scrooge is not somebody you would want to buy a used car from or a used house, either, because inevitably you will get screwed. I lived across from Scrooge’s house, which is located at the northwest corner of Fourth and Washington Street for more than a decade, and in that time I saw how reluctant Scrooge was to spend a dime on the upkeep of that historic residence. Since he sold it to a doctor for $445,000 in 2009, not a week has gone by that the vans of plumbers, electricians, heating and cooling specialists, tree surgeons, et cetera, have not been parked outside, sometimes for a week or more at a time. and sometimes more than one at a time. What the doctor may have discovered was that he had bought the equivalent of Edgar Alan Poe’s the House of Usher, the fall of which he presumably had to spend considerable sums of money to prevent. The huge rotting trees at the corner of Fourth and Washington Streets were a hazard for at least the last ten years, with large limbs falling down on the street corner in windy weather. I avoided walking on Scrooge’s side of the street not just because of the tree, but because of the thousands of starlings who congregated in the rotting trees and whose droppings gave a certain Jackson Pollock-paint dripping character to the sidewalks below. The doctor would not know it, but he owes some thanks to the residents in the neighborhood of the House of Usher, because it was they who complained several years ago that the city was notifying them that they had to repair the sidewalks outside their homes while Scrooge’s sidewalks, as bad as any in the neighborhood, were allowed to deteriorate year after year with no notices from the city. The streets targeted by Larry Justice were marked with fluorescent orange paint, just to remind home owners they were on the city’s hit list. If Justice had marked Scrooge's house with fluorescent paint, it would have looked liked the photo above. And if you think that political critics of Mayor Kalb were not singled out for fluorescent shenanigans, just ask Harald Daub, one of the council members who was recalled in 1980 and whom Scrooge singled out for special mention in his boastful luncheon.

When I called attention to the sidewalk shenanigans in River Vices and Austin Leedom did on the Sentinel website, it was not long afterwards that Scrooge’s sidewalks were repaired by Neal Hatcher’s construction company. It was during those major sidewalk repairs that Hatcher gave me the finger, a gesture I managed to capture for posterity and which might make a suitable illustration for a Scrooge-like Christmas card. If somebody has not already done it, I think I will create a Scrooge Line of Christmas Cards, of which the following would be the inaugural number.

Up Yours This Xmas

In Dicken’s Christmas Carol, Scrooge undergoes a religious conversion. Scrooge awakens Christmas morning a new man, with a heart filled with love and compassion, with joy and generosity. He even sends a prize turkey to the poor Cratchits for their Christmas dinner. It would be a miracle, but if Portsmouth’s Scrooge were born again, how wonderful it might be for the city. The taxpayers of Portsmouth, with the city on the verge of bankruptcy, cannot afford to renovate and then maintain the large Marting building. Public monies would be much better spent on renovating the Muncipal building or erecting a new building on the site, if the money was available, which it isn’t.

Nothing would be more Christian than if Scrooge were to donate five or six of his millions to renovate the Marting building into new city offices. The building could even be named after him, insuring that posterity would remember him not as an unscrupulous skinflint who corrupted a city but as a beloved philanthropist and benefactor. The unnamed developers who covet the land the Municipal Building now occupies could purchase it at a fair price, and develop whatever they have had in mind for the site. But that’s a dream. The reality is our Scrooge will much more likely use David Malone to screw the citizens of Portsmouth by making them pay for the renovation of Marting’s. Spite not charity would be the motive of such a course of action, and the Marting building would be a turkey but far from the prize one Scrooge gives to the Crachits. Still, this is the season of miracles and all of us are encouraged to believe. What is that music I hear in the background? Is it a Christmas carol or is it the theme from The Godfather?

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the town,
Not a tater was frying, not even hash brown.
The lapdogs were lying by the chimney with care,
In hopes that their paymaster soon would be there.

Malone was nestled all snug in his bed,
While visions of damsels danced in his head,
And Clayton in his loft and Neal on the Hill
Were counting their loot and the take in the till

When out on the street there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a van crashing into two cars parked there,

With a driver so drunk behind the wheel
That I knew in a second it must be Tom Bihl.
Bamboozled by booze and lacking in shame,
He huffed and he puffed and he cursed us by name.

“Damn you, Daub! Damn you, Forrey!
And damn you to hell, Jane Murray!

With Satan—I mean Clayton—behind me, I’ll recall
You in summer, I’ll recall you in fall.”

While the missus had seldom been dry-eyed,

Police Chief Bihl had often been pie-eyed.
So up to the roof of Marting’s he flew

Like an express train from hell: “Choo-choo!”

His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

At Dicken’s Pub he’d drunk so much beer

He looked like Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer.

Though as auditor he was later indicted,

For his midnight ride he was never cited.

“I need a goddamned breathalyzer

Like I need a Marting appraisal from Kizer.”

And then as he tinkled on the roof

(For drunks, you know, are very uncouth)

He yelled, “Watch out below”

Before he jumped down in a pile of snow.

He sprang to his van, and turned on the ignition,
And away he flew on the road to perdition.
But I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight,
“I’m really not drunk, I’m just a little tight!”

Sunday, December 05, 2010

As the hours dwindle down to election day, next Tuesday, December 7th, the river of lies coming from the Recall Mayor Murray campaign threatens to overflow the floodwall of truth. Funded by their multi-millionaire silent backers, the Recallers have all the money in the world to buy newspaper space and radio time to repeat the lies and insinuations Frank Lewis of the Portsmouth Daily Times has been making for the last year. And the PDT now republishes the headlines about Jane Murray for the last year, but it doesn’t republish the headlines about the Recall front man Tom Bihl, the colic alcoholic who totaled two parked vehicles but was not given a breathalyzer test and later, when he was Portsmouth City Auditor, was indicted for using public money to repair his automobile. And not a word about “Hell on Wheels Bihl” from Lewis, the PDT’s paid prevaricator. Nor is there a word from Lewis or the PDT about the scandalous sexual shenanigans of David Malone, the minister David Malone, the Second Ward councilman David Malone, and president of Portsmouth City Council David Malone, next in line to become Mayor David Malone if Murray is recalled. Yes, David Malone would become the next mayor even though he has been twice soundly rejected by Portsmouth voters in mayoral primaries. Is Mayor Malone one of the prices we have to pay for being a Home Rule city?

This so-called man of god stood on the steps of the Municipal Building in June of 2005, in the photo above, denouncing the nameless forces of evil that were hovering over Portsmouth. He didn’t name them, of course, because he is the adulterous tool of the crooks who control Portsmouth and in particular of real-estate predator Neal Hatcher. So why would he name them? I captured on tape Malone’s performance on the steps of the Municipal Building, as well as the presence of his wife, the breadwinner of the family, whom Malone publicly disgraces with his philandering. And there she was, back in 2005, parading in front of the Municipal Building, talking in tongues:

“@#$%xz&$@3X#@&z&$@3X#@&!”

What did it mean? I don't know. But could it be translated as, “If that son-of-a-bitch cheats on me with one more white girl I'm going to smack him in the face.” That in fact is just what Malone's wife did do, smack him (and his girlfriend) in the face in public, according to a report filed at the sheriff's office last year, on April 29, 2009. That sheriff's report was uncovered by Austin Leedom, whose dogged investigative reporting puts Frank Lewis to shame. Here is a photocopy of part of the sheriff office’s report:

This hypocritical preacher of the gospel was not only betraying the people of Portsmouth on the city council, he was also carrying on an affair with a female employee of the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority, the same public agency where his wife worked. Is this the same girlfriend whom Malone's wife reportedly slapped last year? Without a score card, who can keep them straight? It helps underemployed males who have trouble finding real jobs to have wives with jobs in the public sector. There is an adage “Don’t get involved romantically with people you work with.” It needs to be amended for Malone: “Don’t get involved romantically with people your wife works with in the public sector, not unless you want to jeopardize your main source of income and your insurance coverage.” Malone stood on the steps of the Municipal Building and denounced the nameless evil-doers of Portsmouth at the same time that as councilman he was not only violating his marriage vows by cheating on his wife, he was also violating his oath of office by serving the interests of the nameless evil doers.

Malone’s last-minute letter-to-the-editor that appeared in the PDT on November 3rd, 2007, was another lie because Malone did not write it, in my opinion, any more than Timothy Loper wrote the letters-to-the-editor that appeared in the PDT when he was on city council. Loper wrote a letter, a lofty pronouncement on the evils of drinking and driving, something he could speak with authority on given his record for drunk driving. Don’t be surprised if the PDT sooner or later publishes a lofty pronouncement from Malone denouncing adultery and repenting his practice of it. The way people write is almost as unique as fingerprints. Malone, like Loper, has an individual style of writing, if “style” is interpreted very loosely, which is how much of Malone's behavior should be interpreted, very loosely. I have read Malone’s writing. Malone is literate, but he writes in tongues, in a manner of speaking. Malone is a tool of those who control the city, and he will vote as they wish. He will also write as they dictate, literally. I know what Malone writes like. Just as most people can tell one voice from another, someone who has taught composition for forty years, fifteen of them in Portsmouth, can tell when someone tries to pass off as their own letters that were dictated or drafted by someone else. And the Portsmouth Daily Times will publish them a few days before any election, giving them, and the crooks they front for, the last word.

The Predator and the Preacher

Malone is especially useful to Hatcher and Hatcher to Malone. Malone signs were visible on Hatcher’s empty lots throughout the city when Malone last ran for city council. And Malone alone, of all the candidates, had the privilege of having his campaign signs on Hatcher’s mansion-office on Gay Street (shown above). I recall the city council meeting at which Hatcher showed up with some smoke-and-mirror architectural designs for the renovation of the leaky black-mold Adelphia building into a police station. Malone’s wife was there to help Hatcher display the designs, presumably on a volunteer basis, for certainly an employee of the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority, which she worked for then, would not have been assigned to help Hatcher promote the Adelphia building scam. Would she?

“How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” Malone wrote indignantly about Lee Scott’s disparaging of Malone’s professional qualifications to be a minister and his limitations as a breadwinner. If you believe Malone wrote that sentence, “How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” you probably believe that Timothy Loper wrote his letters-to-the-editor. The only person I can think of who would sound right uttering that sentence would be the late melodramatic actress Bette Davis. Look at it once more: “How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” Oh, the moral outrage and fulmination, and this from the hypocritical adulterous councilman who carried on with a woman who not only worked with his wife at the PMHA but was also a member of his congregation. The truth is Malone’s wife is the breadwinner: Malone is the sinner. If she speaks in tongues, he speaks with a forked tongue. Given the choice, I would much rather vote for Malone's wife than Malone. She is a hardworking employee, a devoted mother, and a faithful if somewhat exasperated wife, while Malone himself is, well, Malone.

Malone wrote that “[Lee] Scott’s comment on the idea I would be in favor of an income-tax increase really is not an issue.” It is not an issue that a member of city council is in favor of raising income taxes and said so at a public forum that was reported on in the Daily Times? That is not an issue? Whoever wrote Malone’s letter tried to cover up for Malone by saying it was not relevant. Malone’s statement to the League of Women Voters forum was one of those statements that Malone sometimes makes when he has to speak in public without a prepared script and then tries to deny afterwards.

The “Other Party”

By far the biggest lie in the letter somebody wrote for Malone is in regard to the Marting Scam. After saying he had not been in favor of the purchase of the Marting building, Malone, or his ghost writer wrote: “But the other party involved in the deal came back to the city and said, ‘OK, let us make it right. We will give you another $500,000 for the pain and suffering caused you.’ Believe me, any successful corporation, intelligent businessman or the common citizen would accept that offer.” Doesn’t Malone, or whoever drafted his letter understand there are minutes of the council meetings and that no one representing “the other party involved,” to use the euphemism, ever came back and said anything about making up for “the pain and suffering we have caused you”? What the so-called “other party,” that is Clayton Johnson, actually did was stick it to the city and the taxpayers a second time and got a full pardon for any crimes the Marting Foundation may have committed the first time around. The “other party,” that is Clayton Johnson, is not giving anybody anything. That money was stolen from the taxpayers, and then when the sale was invalidated by the courts, the “other party” set up a number of conditions by which the city could get some of the money back.

Why didn’t “the other party” simply give back all the money he had stolen? Attorney Stan Bender, representing “the other party,” came before the council and said one of the reasons the Marting Foundation would not give the money back was because the city government could not be trusted with it. And with councilmen as clueless and careless as David Malone, who can say Bender was not right? Not having done his homework or attended the rump meeting that took place prior to regular meetings, Malone sometimes came to some council meetings unsure how he was supposed to vote. He waited to see how Marty Mohr or Howard Baughman voted. And if Johnson and Hatcher and their front man Bihl have their way, Malone is the man who will be mayor of Portsmouth for the next three years. They may find a way to get rid of him before three years is up, because he is likely to prove too much of an embarrassment and impediment to their plans, one of which will possibly be, by hook or by crook, to finally complete the Marting Scam and turn that building into public offices. If Malone is going to continue to be slapped in the face in public because of his philandering, he is not going to be in a position to persuade anybody that renovating the rotting Marting building is the sensible thing to do. But Malone is going to try as slavishly as Kalb did as mayor to connive to convert the Marting building into public offices. Malone might even end up with a big office in the Marting building, as Kalb once hoped to do. Malone may make it into the office of the mayor by the back door, just as Mike Mearan once got onto the city council by the back door.

Kalb, Mearan, Malone: only in a Home Rule city like Portsmouth could such incompetent, corrupt failures through means of the back door become the front men for the unscrupulous multi-millionaires who are getting athletic complexes named after themselves at the same time that they continue to try to fix every election and eliminate any competition in the lucrative games they play.

Followers

About Me

Retired now, I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, hold B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Wesleyan U. (Conn.) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, where I was a Research Associate at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies and a coordinator of a committee that organized international American Studies conferences during the American Bicentennial. From 1989-2006, I taught English at Shawnee State U., in Portsmouth, Ohio, where I was active in the faculty union, the Shawnee Education Association, serving four terms as president. I also served as faculty advisor to the student gay and lesbian group. I have served also as president of the Concerned Citizens of Portmouth and Scioto County, a community action group.
My scholarly interests have focused on the American Dream: the Myth and the Realities.
I can be reached at rforr1@roadrunner.com
A selection of my poems can be found at http://xpalidosis.blogspot.com The original contents of all blogs on this site are copyrighted @.